Cosmic Homogeneity Demonstrated with Luminous Red Galaxies

By David W. Hogg, Daniel J. Eisenstein, M. Blanton, N. Bahcall, J. Brinkmann, James E. Gunn, D. Schneider. 2004

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We test the homogeneity of the universe at z ~ 0.3 with the luminous red galaxy (LRG) spectroscopic sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. First, the mean number N(R) of LRGs within completely surveyed LRG-centered spheres of comoving radius R is shown to be proportional to R3 at radii greater than R ~ 70 h-1 Mpc. The test has the virtue that it does not rely on the assumption that the LRG sample has a finite mean density; its results show, however, that there is such a mean density. Second, the survey sky area is divided into 10 disjoint solid angular regions, and the fractional rms density variations of the LRG sample in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.35 among these (~ 2 × 107 h-3 Mpc3) regions is found to be 7% of the mean density. This variance is consistent with typical biased ΛCDM models and puts very strong constraints on the quality of SDSS photometric calibration.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e72c77514400d9563434c8f1f27b71ebfed569a

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Citations in the corpus

Backreaction in Late-Time Cosmology (2011, background): “Whether the existence of a homogeneity scale has been observationally established is a matter of contention [28,32], and studies of the morphology of structures suggest that such a scale is no smaller than 300 Mpc [33].”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the transition to large-scale cosmic homogeneity (2012, methodology): “In the past, authors have defined the ‘scale of homogeneity’ as the scale where the data becomes consistent with homogeneity within 1σ (e.g. Hogg et al. 2005; Bagla et al. 2008; Yadav et al. 2010).”
Very Small Scale Clustering and Merger Rate of Luminous Red Galaxies (2005, background): “In addition, recent studies have used extremely large scale galaxy clustering to test fundamental cosmological hypotheses, such as homogeneity of the universe (Hogg et al. 2005) and flatness of the universe (Eisenstein et al. 2005).”
Evidence for anisotropy of cosmic acceleration (2018, background): “Counts-in-spheres of galaxy catalogues have suggested that there is a transition to (statistical) homogeneity on scales exceeding ∼100 Mpc (Hogg et al. 2005; Scrimgeour et al. 2012), although sufficiently large volumes have not yet been surveyed to establish this definitively.”
TWO MICRON ALL SKY SURVEY PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFT CATALOG: A COMPREHENSIVE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CENSUS OF THE WHOLE SKY (2013, background): “Although tests applicable to surveys of even limited sky coverage exist (e.g. Hogg et al. 2005; Sarkar et al. 2009; Gibelyou & Huterer 2012; Marinoni et al. 2012; Scrimgeour et al. 2012), their usefulness for all-sky redshift surveys is currently limited by the shallowness of the latter.”
Cosmological parameter constraints from SDSS luminous red galaxies: a new treatment of large-scale clustering (2009, result): “However, Hogg et al. (2005) found that the large-scale density variations in the final LRG sample are completely consistent with the predictions of biased CDM models, showing that when averaged over large angular scales, the fluctuations in the photometric calibration of the SDSS do not affect…”
Clustering of luminous red galaxies – IV. Baryon acoustic peak in the line-of-sight direction and a direct measurement of H(z) (2008, background): “These galaxies trace a big volume, around 1 Gpc3h−3, which makes them ideal for studying clustering on large scales (see Hogg et al. 2005).”